Pizza

One time I had this job working at a pizza buffet. There were all these hot guys who worked there.

I was in junior high, and they were out getting wasted in fields on the weekends, singing songs with girls who stayed out all night. They seemed so free.

There was this one guy with curly blonde hair. He had a big smile and deep-set eyes. He liked to hug me before I went home, walking across the golf course alone at night, thinking about everything I would do when I was their age.

He would hold me a little too long, blonde, and I would breathe in his deodorant and his shampoo and the metallic stink of his sweat.

I love boys. I want to beat them and lick them all over like a mama cat.

These ones were protective of me like a kid sister, and sometimes when one of them would cross the line another one would step in and shake his head at his friend like, buddy, no. It was so fucking frustrating. I wanted them to take me out.

Anything, then, to be out of that house, my house of a closed up throat, with people I'd been looking at my whole life and they still didn't couldn't understand me.

I remember this girl who came in to see the blonde boy. She had these long and golden, deer-like legs. She walked like someone from California. Her ankles were heartbreakingly thin, erotically smooth and even.

I stared at her, and she gave me a meaningless smile because I was a kid and she was the kind of girl who smiled at everyone, everything, without meaning. Then she jumped up into the blonde guy.

It was like a photoshoot for Seventeen. The sun shot through the window between them, and I felt a stabbing pain in my chest because I would never be blonde and caramel like them.

I slunk into the kitchen, where Elliot was washing the dishes. He looked at me, and I mumbled something.

"Do you have an accent?" he says.

"No."

"I think you sound kind of Swedish. We think you sound kind of Swedish."

"Huh."

"Like, that Swedish lilt, you know."

"Do you think Josh's girlfriend is pretty?" I said. I shoved the tray of dishes into the machine for him.

"They all look like that, in high school. It's not special," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Just that. She's not special." He turned away from me, concentrating on something, and I left, feeling unsatisfied. When I went home I stood in front of the mirror and lifted up my jeans. I looked at my legs. I'd never noticed my ankles before.

They were snow white, and startlingly beautiful.

A couple years later I saw Elliot working at my video store, and I pretended I didn't know him. I don't remember why.
Then, one day we pretended to recognize each other. "Oh! -it's you!" It was really stupid.